I know many of you have probably had this problem before. You splay an mp3 and you don't hear anything but the file is playing.

(You can check if it's playing by using $insong)

If you "splay file position" a little ahead you can start it from where you can hear it. I was wondering if it's at all possible to accurately calculate the position to start it from for every mp3.

I made it a point to check out some of the mp3s that I have that had the silent beginning, the position varies. About the only way so far I can think of in solving this weird problem is just reencoding the mp3s. But surely there's a way to figure out where the actual silent data ends at the beginning of an mp3 to make it play correctly.

Any thoughts?

I was thinking of using bread $bvar and $bfind to have mirc skip empty data at the beginning of where the header is found. But so far no dice.

Well the only thing I can suggest since the MP3 file itself beginning data is not empty

is that you can use

echo -a $insong.pos for a few songs to find its position where it starts

then splay -p filename positionvaluehere

By empty data i mean 0'ed out at the beginning of the file. After the ID3v2 data (if found) and after the LAME data. Where the file actually starts and perhaps search for the correct beginning, then calculate a length offset or something. I've tried this and haven't come up with positive results. I study most of the mp3's i'm trying using Hex Workshop. The empty data 0000 0000 0000 etc... Trying to find a constant string to find to then calculate the length offset.

As far as $insong is concerned it'd have to be playing first before I could use that identifier . $insong only works if something is playing. I need to get this data before playing the file.